We do a bit of roadside and farmstand vending on the weekends. Last week we did a small catering job and brisket was on the menu. The brisket turned out really well but we have some left over. We sell pulled pork, smoked sausage and chicken thighs and have always wanted to add brisket. My question is how to present it for sale... In a sammie would it be thin/thick sliced or chopped or pulled... what would be a good serving size and of course how much to sell for. We get $8.00 for a pulled pork sammie... $6.00 for smoked sausage and $4.00 for a chicken thigh.

Ok, when I first saw the thread title, I thought "wrap it in a Lobster shell"

I don't vend. I eat. So, my preference would be thin sliced for a sammie. And I think the same price as a pulled pork sammie would be a good price in my mind._________________Brinkman Upright
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I have a real good meat supplier here and pork butt is $1.59/lb and brisket is $2.59... Bone in chicken thighs cost $.79/lb. I think I'm making out really well on the pork and chicken so to vary the menu and give them something special I can do the brisket for $8.00. I also get less shrinkage on the brisket than I do on the pork so they end up costing out about the same.

I was really looking for serving suggestions... I don't have a slicing machine so do it with a knife. Thick... thin... on a diagonal... in a plate by itself or on a sandwich?

If you only take them up to 195° [ which does save weight] slice thin, 205° and you can / must go thicker. We do sammies, but also offer a "sampler" combo plate with a corn bread [ i.e. pork, chicken, 1 rib and brisket] which is a meal in itself approximate 3-4oz portions with a cornbread for $14.00. If you dont do ribs, make it a 3 meat sampler!
We do them mainly as sammies, but some ask for no bun....saves me $0.25 _________________Money MakerScrapper
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We're mostly on the same page. We do a sampler with PP, sausage, chicken thigh, corn bread and a side (cole slaw or potato salad for $13.00.

BBQ in Maine is mostly understood as burgers and dogs on the grill. We did start doing smoked hot dogs at $3.00 each or 2/$5.00... great money maker. This is our second year and it's much improved from last year. Our season is short.. pretty much over by the end of October.

I'm sure we'll be adding brisket as a regular item. Don't have much experience with ribs though. Maybe next year.

Ken, if you're selling PP sammies at $8, you need to sell your brisket sammies at $10 to get the same profit margin. Due to the fact that brisket costs you about 60% more per pound than pork, if you sell your brisket for the same price as pork, you're going to be pretty much giving away your profit on every brisket sammie you sell. And since you would be replacing profitable PP sales with no profit brisket sales, you're going to be giving away your profit on all your sammie sales. Not an approach that I would take.

So, where did I come up with $10? I had to make some assumptions. First, that your food cost on the PP is 40%. Second, that the labor and other costs for PP and brisket are the same. At 40% of an $8 PP sale, your food cost on PP is $3.20 per sammie. Your brisket price per pound is 63% higher than your pork price. So your food cost for brisket is $3.20 (PP food cost) times 1.63, or $5.22. Since your food cost for brisket is about $2 more than your food cost for PP, and all other costs are the same, you need to charge $2 more for brisket than you do for PP to generate the same profit.

There is a marketing aspect to this, too. If you sell PP and brisket for the same price once, you're telling your customers that you can sell brisket for the same cost as PP until the end of time. And that brisket provides the same value as PP. You're de-valueing your brisket. I saw Boston Market do this when they opened a new store and sold a chicken dinner for four people for $5. In effect, they told people that was what the chicken dinner was worth. When they raised their price to the level they needed to stay in business, people felt like they were being screwed and refused to eat from Boston Market. The location went out of business. Don't shortchange yourself.

(By way of background, I spent 10 years running restaurant kitchens and 25 years as the controller of a variety of food processing plants owned by Fortune 500 food companies. I'm not a BBQ expert. But, I do have a fair amount of expertise when it comes to food costs and menu pricing.)